News and Thanet issues. Ramsgate Margate and Broadstairs are the three main towns on The Isle of Thanet situated in the far southeast of England.
I run the bookshop in Ramsgate see www.michaelsbookshop.com I publish over 100 books about the history of this area click here to look at them.

Monday, 2 April 2012

Photos webstats luftwaffe on the mat and a stamp on the toe, for being so slow.

The school Easter holidays have started, not the month I used to get, but a couple of weeks. With the price of petrol at the moment I am inclined to stay in Thanet more than usual and on every day off the tricky problem of what to do with two primary school children on days off, rises in the backs of the adult minds here like the square root of minus one.

As it is pretty much all car journeys now also involve moving books about and doing shopping, anyway the plan yesterday was to do Quex grounds and the Powell Cotton museum stopping off at the Spitfire and Hurricane museum on the way.

In terms of museum opening we were both lucky and unlucky, my youngest daughter asked me why the calculator on her phone, while calculating the square root of 16 as 4 seems to think the square root of minus 16 is 42, she is now reading Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, so understands the meaning of a low probability. Sorry I digress we went to the Spitfire museum in the morning this was lucky as it had to close during the afternoon due to a lack of volunteers. We then travelled on to Quex in the sure and certain knowledge that if there wasn’t a small probability of going via the moon the universe would cease to exist. Anyway we arrived at Quex like four cats in a jam jar, and the wave function collapsed revelling that it didn’t open until tomorrow, which is now today.

I have a bookshop to open so I will add the bit about the luftwaffe on the mat later on.

Staying on the subject of aviation for a moment, my son is studying science at a higher level, doing a thing called a masters, which essentially allows us to move together in a higher country of the mind, and mutually share ignorance of a more complex nature. He sent me the aviation video above the other day, before I discovered the mat pictured above and it may or may not be advisable to watch it, depending on what you want to know.

In something of a coals to Newcastle way we bought some Biggles books from the Spitfire museum, there are 102 Biggles books so keeping an adequate stock in a secondhand bookshop can be difficult.

No doubt as Biggles evidently works it out I will also get there in the end, although for some reason blogger won’t let me insert the picture of the books the right way up, tried this in IE and Chrome.

Coming back to the webstats at the moment, in what I take to be a move towards turning the www into cww we have entered a phase where UK blogs now have two addresses .com and .co.uk.

Earlier this week, like Alice I went down this particular rabbit hole with google books, a friend of mine who is an American geology professor, wrote a book about gas plant contamination.

One has to be careful here an American may mean different things due to our languages separating several hundred, years ago.

For instance an American who says: “I’m mad about my flat.” Probably means he is annoyed because he has a puncture and not that he likes his apartment.

But in this instance the gas in question transpires not to be petrol, but good old fashioned suicide in the oven, coal gas, and the contamination that relates to my small contribution to his book concerns the gasworks on each side of Boundary Road in Ramsgate.

So we now, most of us bloggers have two addresses in the stats, meaning that things are not at first what they seem, curioser and……..

Back to the aviation again, hence the, Blind Faith, picture to remind me to keep on track, having started negotiations to buy the airport, I discovered the asking price is £80,000,000 so will have to dig in the back pocket for that one.

here is Clive Hart on the airport

I get some funny emails due to checking stuff out and thought this one could amuse a few people

Dear purchasing manager,

We are pleased to get to know that you are presently on the market for cyclohexanone, and as a specialized manufacturer and exporter for this product in China, we sincerely hope to establish business relations with your esteemed corporation.

5 comments:

£80 million??? Are you sure? They paid less than £20 million for it and I can't see what they've done that would make it worth four times as much. Given that we're now in the middle of a deep recession I'd have thought a price tag of £10 million or less would be reasonable.

I thought it was 22 million, but that is only from memory, but yes 80 was the figure quoted and I did also mention the sale about a week before the news broke in the conventional media. Albeit like this at the bottom of a rather obscure posting, frankly I don’t have an interest in becoming a national or regional media source, so I don’t splash this sort of thing across the top of the blog. However it is the sort of thing that is of real interest to locals.

Realistically though this figure would be subject to barging and I gather there are several interested parties, including BA depending on the price.

Edinburgh airport is selling for £500,000,000. Manston is not worth £80,000,000, at least not as an airport.There are no interested parties looking to buy it as a going concern as it is not a going concern. It is losing £4,000,000 each year. BAWC has 60 flights a week from stansted. They are not looking to buy an airport for 60 flights a week 100 miles from their cargo handling warehouses at stansted or heathrow.

Saturday for me was pure self indulgence, so first I went to Canterbury Cathedral, I have to admit that I find advent one of the hardest ...

recent comments

Local history facilities.

Much of the local history I publish is available for free on this blog, in some cases I have linked whole books to blog postings, if you want a printed copy of one of the books I publish click here postage is free to UK addresses.

Alternatively you can of course come to my bookshop in Ramsgate and browse them and about 30,000 secondhand books on other subjects, remember we close Thursdays and Sundays.